This explainer is part of Quanta Magazine’s Origins of Life Week. Check back throughout the week for more stories about one of science’s biggest unknowns. For well over 4 billion years, the fire of metabolism has powered the engines of life. The ability of cells to gather, transform, and harness chemical energy from their surroundings is the central force driving the dizzyingly complex network… Source This explainer is part of Quanta Magazine’s Origins of Life Week. Check back through...

Our fast_float library parses numbers such as -731.51 into binary floating-point values. It is part of GCC’s C++ standard library, among others. It is fast: often a few nanoseconds per number. Parsing a number means making decisions. Is there a sign? How many digits are there? Where is the decimal point? Is the processor rounding in the default mode? Each decision is a branch in the code. Modern processors do not wait to know the outcome of a branch: they guess, and they keep working. Wh...

Our house has a box room, full of boxes that we still haven't unpacked from our last move. A couple of weeks ago something in that room started intermittently beeping . The beeps were far enough apart that standing in the room and trying to determine the source of the noise was frustrating, and I really didn't want to dig through every one of those boxes. So I had Claude Code build Beep Locator , a software system for triangulating the source of a mysterious beep using multiple devices scatter...

Another member of the extended family came down to Sydney over the weekend, so we went for a bit of exploring. I’ve been back in Australia for more than a decade now, but there’s still so much of this beautiful city and its surrounds I’ve never seen before; being with someone from overseas lets me be a bit of a tourist, too. The highlight for me was seeing South Head in the Sydney Harbour National Park for the first time. This is part of the headlands that sit between the Sydney CBD ...

For our last movie night we watched Princess Mononoke . I remembered loving that movie when I was younger, but watching it as an adult made me once again realize how Miyazaki has a way of expressing diverging sides without picking one. The film shows people, animals and spirits with legitimate and largely incompatible needs, and each faction is further engaged in infighting. A central arc of the story is Lady Eboshi’s Irontown, which gives people who were largely rejected by society work,...

Japan’s SLIM spacecraft on the Moon as imaged by the LEV-2 crawler bot (inset image) and India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter (background). An arrow points to the tiny lander on the image’s right. Images: JAXA / TOMY / SONY / ISRO / Chandra Tungathurthi This story pieces together insights from experts at JAXA, NASA, and ISRO. On January 19, 2024, Japan’s solar-powered Smart Lander for Investigating Moon ( SLIM) lander made a lopsided-but-successful touchdown on Earth’s cosmic companion. ...

Tekkoh on an iPhone Duo opened flat: the margin of the day on the left, your words on the right. (All the screenshots here are of a made-up demo journal.) Tekkoh is a journal for iPhone. Tekkoh on an iPhone Duo opened flat: the margin of the day on the left, your words on the right. (All the screenshots here are of a made-up demo journal.) Tekkoh is a journal for iPhone.

There are a couple of related ideas I found myself writing about here and there, either on the IRC server or on Quxnet . Ideas and thoughts about what the web used to be, how it used to feel, about how things have changed, and what can be done to bring at least some of the old web back. We often point fingers at the big social media platforms, with their relentless algorithmic curation as the cause for the awfulness of the modern web. Maybe we blame the SEO folks, or the influencers. There’...

I see a lot of discussion around “TUI vs. GUI” for coding agents. This discussion is often of the form: “the more I use Claude Code/Codex/Pi, the more I’ve outgrown the TUI and want to use a GUI app”. The comment that nudged me to write this is in this recent HN discussion : I used to use ChatGPT/Claude in the TUI up until like 3 months ago, but my usage of LLMs has exploded - many sessions across many projects. I feel like I outgrew the TUI and now I’m using ChatGPT/Claude desk...

This post demonstrates how to use monads in the Lean programming language (Lean 4, to be specific). If you're not familiar with Lean, this part of the language is very similar to other functional programming languages, like Haskell or OCaml. Motivating example - evaluating expressions Suppose we want to write a simple numerical expression evaluator that supports numbers with addition and division: inductive Expr where | num : Int → Expr | add : Expr → ...

Walks as path finding — Past inclement weather Perspectives revealed. This haiku was written on November 10th. Walks as path finding — Past inclement weather Perspectives revealed. This haiku was written on November 10th. Walks as path finding — Past inclement weather Perspectives revealed. This haiku was written on November 10th. This haiku was written on November 10th.

Just another day in Casa Quirk. 🤣 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Just another day in Casa Quirk. 🤣 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ ...

By a mile, the iPhone Duo has garnered more questions about what I think about it than any other phone I’ve ever had. It’s clearly a phone that has people intrigued, so I thought I’d jot down some loose, unorganized thoughts about what I think about it after about ten days. If I could sum all my thoughts up into one word, it’d simply be “fun”. I think for the vast majority of people, myself included, the iPhone 18 Pro is a more practical phone that through scientific analysis y...

Some metrics When I set up the infrastructure for Casuarina Linux I repurposed an AMD AM4 system with Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core CPU (105W TDP) and 32Gb of DDR4 RAM as the build server. I set it up in our laundry, connected it via a smart plug, and reset its counters. Over the course of the project I would regularly pull package updates from Chimera Linux , build and install them locally, and then push them to the repo, which would trigger Buildbot to build and publish them. 💡 A...

I recently took on a project to implement a language model on an FPGA. In simple terms, a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is an IC that can be reconfigured to implement hardware circuit designs written in a Hardware Description Language (HDL) such as SystemVerilog. They are particularly interesting because you don't run software on them the way you would using microcontrollers. Instead, you reconfigure the chip into a hardware design. This gives you things that you couldn't get in software ...

Landscape with mill and cattle, by Jacob van Strij, via WikiArt. Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at Florida’s property tax rollback, projected PCB shortages, the end of Tesla’s Cybertruck, the lack of progress in carbon storage, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items this week: I accidentally em...

Contract significantly expands Greece’s V-BAT fleet and includes spares, training, ground support equipment and long-term in-service support ATHENS (November 11, 2026) — The NATO Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA) has ordered additional Shield V-BAT vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) for the Hellenic Armed Forces. The additional aircraft order significantly expands a capability already in Hellenic service for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissa...

I had an in-person work team meeting last week. In the office, they had Bevi seltzer machines. When Bevi machines first arrived at Facebook, where I used to work, I looked down on them. They seemed to be a cost reduction, a sad imitation of The Good Stuff that came in cans and bottles in the fridge. Good Stuff such as LaCroix 1 and Ito En tea 2 . But this week was different. I noticed that this Bevi had a caffeine option 3 . After some experimentation, I decided that for the week, I woul...

I am not a believer in glue work 1 . Processes that can only be sustained by the unrewarded sacrifice of engineers ought to die. Now that LLMs are writing most of our code, does that free human engineers up to do more glue work ? No, it doesn’t. I think glue work is actually less important to companies than it was in the 2010s. Let’s go through four reasons why. First, AI decreases the amount of coordination needed to ship . The magnifying effect of AI agents means that any single en...

I’m thinking about extending this set of debugging examples with the more complex examples described below. I’d be very grateful for feedback: would they be useful? Would they be useful to you ? What other examples could be included, or should be included instead of some of the ones I’ve outlined? Log Ingestion Pipeline A command-line Python tool that reads application log files, normalizes each line, extracts structured fields, and loads them into SQLite for later querying. W...

By Shreya S Ramanujam , Yongce Li , Afshine Amidi , Sina Ghiassian , Benjamin Klein . Introduction Picture this — you’re home after a long day at work and can’t wait to catch up on Bridgerton. You log on to Netflix, search for “Bridgerton” and land on this screen: If this sounds familiar, you already know what a synopsis is — it’s a short glimpse into what a viewer can expect to see in a show. We see two types of synopses here: a series-level synopsis describing th...

LANCE: You should take a break from all the AI stuff and talk about your book! BILL: I will!  But it's not my book  its co-authored with Erik Demaine and Mohammad Hajiaghayi. The title is Computational Intractability: A Guide to Algorithmic Lower Bounds LANCE: That sounds similar to Garey and Johnson's classic Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness BILL: Indeed. DGH is a sequel to Garey and Johnson. LANCE: But so much has happened since 1979. BILL: Yes. That's ...

Going through a collection of old parts, CuriousMarc encountered some ICs that he couldn't identify. He opened up one of these ICs, and I studied it under the microscope. After some reverse engineering, I determined that it was a logic chip that implemented four NAND gates using old-fashioned diode-transistor logic (DTL). 1 The chip turned out to be the ST680A, a member of the Signetics 600 series of chips from 1965. In this article, I discuss the circuitry in this chip and how diode-transistor...